The existing Intel® Corporation Personal Health System (PHS) is a dedicated appliance that provides a variety of functions, including acquisition and transmission of patient medical data. The data is also sent to a back-end service to allow analysis and monitoring by automated agents and clinicians. That data may include blood pressure, weight, pulse, etc. The functions associated with the data acquisition and transmission are regulated in some countries, typically by agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States. The PHS performs a mixture of regulated and unregulated functions.
There is a desire to reduce the cost of the implementation by running PHS functions on a general-purpose personal computing device, including personal computer that might already be in the patient's home, while maintaining security levels of a dedicated system.